Thunder Creek Outfitters

2018 Fall Report

I am continually
amazed at how unique each fall is. Thankfully, waterfowl still migrate. Two years ago, we got rained out. This year,
it did not rain on us one day. I don’t mean to say we had perfect weather. We
had unprecedented cold the last week of Sept. and the first week of Oct. and
then the next two weeks were warm and sunny. Last year we went after snows for
both the morning and afternoon hunts on several occasions. This year, we hunted
snows very little.

The most definitive
thing about 2018 was that here were almost no
juvenilesnow geese. From what I
have heard, everyone was having a tough time decoying snows. When you study a
flock carefully and cannot find a young bird, you know it probably won’t take
long to clean birds after the shoot. The overall numbers were good and they
came early because of the extreme cold but the flocks that had some juvies
didn’t show until the last week of October. So, we had the same adult snow
geese week after week.

Because of the
situation with the snow geese we spent more time hunting darkgeese. I think it
was our best ever season shooting
hookers (Canadas) and whitefront (specs). In early Sept. we decided to replace
all of our full body honker decoys with new Avian X honkers. It was a timely
and good choice. They look great and are quite compact. What I like best is
that all of our snows, honkers and duck
decoys are Avian X with the same motion stake system. It is ideal for
outfitting because they are high quality and look great and everything sets up
the same way.

When I think about our crane hunting, I notice a smile coming
on my face. They are fun to decoy and we had our best ever season hunting them as well. That’s one of the nice
things about having several different kinds of waterfowl to hunt. The snow
hunting was marginal but we had excellent honker and crane hunting.

We had some spectacular duck hunts, but it wasn’t consistent. The main reason is that we have had considerable competition for
the ducks from non-resident hunters who shoot the ponds where the ducks are
staging or roosting and that runs the ducks out of the country. I wish there
was a simple solution to deal with that.

Superb decoys are a
thing of beauty. We feel like full body Avain X are the best available so, as I
mentioned above, that is what we have for snows, Canadas, and Mallards. The
only decoys that are better quality is the Deception crane decoys. They are
over $100 a piece and hard to get but we have been buying a few each year and
plan to continue doing that because we have all the other decoys we want and we
do want to keep improving our crane decoying.

Another thing I did to
improve our set up this fall was to hand tie more sisal twine on our blinds. I
mean more. Lots more - Nearly 1 mile of
twine on each blind. It was extremely time consuming but the blinds look so
good that basically we just have to “stuff” them with a bit of right colored
material from that specific field and we are set. I was so pleased with the
results that I plan to do even more before next fall. I also plan to cut the
snow stakes down to 20”. We have had too much trouble with shadows on sunny days,
especially in pea or lentil fields.

In spite of the snow
goose situation, we had a good solid season (with the exception of the last
week, which we don’t normally use). The last few years, our early weeks have
been the best hunting, and so we would like to move our hunts earlier when it
works for our long-term clients. We may have a week open for the fall of 2019
so please be in touch if that would be of interest to you.

I want to say “thank you”
to our clients. You have become very special friends. Thank you for
consistently coming to hunt with Dan and me. We have always had family hunts
but this fall we even had two grandsons come along!

Blessings,

Carl Hinderager

Thunder Creek
Outfitters

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Thunder Creek Outfitters - world class outfitters in southern Saskatchewan.
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